RADICAL DEMONSTRATION A PLAY AT LAST PRESENTS THE COMPLEXITIES OF BLACK PANTHER HUEY NEWTON

By DAVID HINCKLEY CRITIC-AT-LARGE

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS|

May 17, 1998 | 12:00 AM

On those days when the 1960s feel far away, a one-man show on Black Panther co-founder Huey P. Newton might sound like a quaint historical trip. As presented at the Schomburg Theater by Roger Guenveur Smith, a Newton look-alike best known from several Spike Lee films, it's nothing of the sort. More on that in a moment. Almost anyone from a certain time, maybe 45, 50, 60 years old now, likely remembers Huey, Bobby and Eldridge. Among the activists who got America's attention in the '60s, those three have had exceptional shelf life: Newton, Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver. They were the stars of the Black Panther Party, the ones everyone remembers pulling out a gun and saying no more Mr. Nice Guy. That image, like the picture of unsmiling men with black berets giving a clenched-fist salute, has tended to outlast the image of, say, the Panthers' breakfast-for-children program, or testimony on how the Panthers influenced the next activist generation. What most folks remember about the Panthers is that the Panthers scared them half to death. The party never had an especially large membership, but because contemporary media often suggested they were just a few hours away from marching into the living rooms of America, everyone kept an eye on them. What tends to get lost with such images, of course, is the people behind them a problem compounded in the case of the Panthers by the fact that the government didn't let some of them live very long. Not too many shooting matches have been more one-sided than when Chicago police killed Fred Hampton in 1969. Of the big three, Cleaver died just a few weeks ago. He was an odd duck a fugitive who came home as a Republican. Seale, whose profile lowered after he was bound and gagged in the Chicago Eight trial, is still around, maybe best known now for his barbecue cookbooks. Man of many sides Newton was the first to go, summer of '89, shot in Oakland by a drug dealer who said he was trying to impress his friends. By then, America had long since stopped looking over its shoulders to see whether Panthers were approaching and had gotten to the business of figuring which socio-pop-culture shelf to put them on. So one of the major realized ambitions of Smith's show, "A Huey P. Newton Story," is to rescue Newton from freeze-drying. In an hour and 45 minutes, without a break, Smith reinjects anger, laughter, bitterness, brilliance, self-pity, self-awareness, self-contradiction and plain old rebellion into the increasingly fixed image of Newton. He creates a character whose discomfort is contagious. He muddies up the character to save him. Smith did this show last year at the Public and the Schomburg, and now he's back at the Schomburg's Roger Furman Theater, Thursday-Sunday through the end of the month. (Call 212-926-0104.) It's worth seeing both for Newton and for Smith, whose character acts as if he wants to crawl out of his skin not because he doesn't like its color, but because often he wants to be someone or somewhere else. "They freed Huey," Smith's character says, referring to the 33-month "Free Huey" campaign after he was jailed in the '70s. "Then Huey came out and they wanted Huey to free them. I said, 'Why don't you all just go and free yourselves?

' " Smith's Newton is frequently charming, but having drawn people in, he doesn't want them too close. He chides his audience for not applauding enough. He chides them for applauding too much. Applause is a cheap substitute for doing something, he tells them. He asks whether they notice that when you're giving the clenched-fist salute, you cannot clap. "A Huey P. Newton Story" isn't biography. It doesn't declare Panther glories, probe the Party's underside or resurrect legal cases. Smith's Newton talks about theology, dances to Bob Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man," asks what a Vandella is, chides Bryant Gumbel, says Martin Luther King's dream "turned into a G--d--nightmare" and finishes up with a long rhapsody built on "Black Orpheus.

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" He drops Newton's issues on today's plate and darned if they don't look fresh. For getting your attention, it's a little less stark than pointing at gun at you. It isn't necessarily any less disturbing.